Commentary : The Last Supper: Gustaf Anders Leaves a Hunger Behind

Restaurants, rather like people on the street and phantasms in a dream, may make fleeting impressions, but most of them pass unremarked.

There are a few, though, that stand like monoliths in a flat and dreary landscape. Gustaf Anders was the bright, shining beacon of good taste in whose steady light all other serious restaurants in this area came to be judged.

Its closing is a traumatic blow to the long-improving restaurant situation in this city.

You might say that San Diego restaurants can be grouped by eras designated pre- and post-Gustaf Anders. None of the top 10 places that preceded it have maintained their rank, but many of those that have followed clearly have been influenced by the Gustaf Anders style. This owes largely to the fact that diners became more demanding once they saw what their dollars could buy.

Although the closing of a restaurant may not seem that momentous, the loss of Gustaf Anders is in fact a cultural loss; although its prices made it inaccessible to many, it served as a training ground for young cooks who have made good, contemporary cuisine more widely available. The standards it set were previously unknown in this city.

Last Sunday was Gustaf Anders’ last night in operation. After serving a house jammed with longtime clients, owners Wilhelm Gustaf Magnuson and Ulf Anders Strandberg shut down their ovens and range tops as the last acts in a San Diego restaurant career that took a pair of Swedish immigrants from the back kitchens of other eateries to the pinnacle of success.

The closing followed settlement of a dispute over the $22,000-a-month rent with the restaurant’s landlords, Jack in the Box founder Robert O. Peterson and newspaper publisher Helen K. Copley.

To anyone who views cooking as an art form that transcends nourishment to act as a transmitter of cultural values, the loss of a leading, innovative restaurant that respects the best traditions is as great a calamity as the loss of a fine arts museum. Gustaf Anders played this role in San Diego, and, although there are other very fine restaurants, none was its peer and none seems likely to assume its mantle of leadership. The leadership role likely will be claimed by an entirely new source that is driven by its own momentum. Such was the case when Gustaf Anders first appeared on the scene.

By design, I took my last meal at Gustaf Anders in the way that I took my first, alone with my thoughts. And, although in the end it was just dinner, it was an hour alive with the memories of my first lunch at Gustaf Anders, at which it became clear that the whole concept of what constituted a top restaurant in San Diego was about to be reinvented.

Nothing seemed as unlikely as Gustaf Anders on Aug. 26, 1981, my 30th birthday. Acting on a tip that San Diego suddenly and improbably had become host to a Swedish restaurant, I stopped in to contemplate the weird fact of aging over what I expected would be a comforting plate of meatballs. I did, in fact, order meatballs--over time, the menu modified its Scandinavian tone in favor of inventive contemporary cuisine--but they were presented in an environment strikingly different from the mom-’n’-pop establishment I had expected.

Twenty-three of the 24 chairs in the tiny room remained empty after I had been seated, but it was obvious that the situation would change quickly enough. I don’t know that I’ve encountered genius before or since, but the thoughtfully composed menu, the austere but sophisticated decor, and the remarkable presentation of the food all made it unmistakably clear that this was the real thing.

Magnuson and Strandberg built that first Gustaf Anders, at 926 Turquoise St. in Pacific Beach, on a budget as scrawny as an underfed anchovy. They upholstered cast-off banquet chairs gleaned from a hotel’s discard pile, cut and sewed their own draperies and linens (they also did their own ironing) and managed for several months without the assistance of a single employee. In the beginning, in fact, they worked nights at the since-closed Casina Valadier in order to pay the expenses of serving lunch at their own place. But, within months, Gustaf Anders became known as San Diego’s finest restaurant, and reservations often required two weeks’ notice.

To skip quickly through seven years of history, it would seem that Magnuson and Strandberg were tripped up by their own success. They expanded the Turquoise Street location into a second room, and then, in mid-1984, moved to the handsomely remodeled premises of the old Rhinelander Haus in La Jolla Shores.

However, many clients felt the new location lacked the intimacy and warmth of the first restaurant and began to drift away. The menu also suffered occasional vagaries, as when Peterson, who made part of his fortune in the fast-food industry and who was at that time a partner in the business, insisted that Gustaf Anders offer hamburgers at lunch. Magnuson and Strandberg responded to this demand in typical style by offering a glamorous burger on a yeasty, home-baked roll, garnished with shoestringed sweet potatoes and pickles from Chino’s vegetable farm.

But a drop-off in business this year made it increasingly difficult to pay the rent, which, as a percentage of business, has been described by several commercial real estate brokers as considerably higher than the accepted industry average. In August, the restaurant ceased paying the rent.

Thus Gustaf Anders served the last of its near-perfect cuisine on Sunday night. The menu was somewhat abbreviated, but it was cooked with the same care as always and included the gravad lax appetizer, or dill-and-sugar-cured salmon served with a sweet mustard sauce; over the years, this preparation became so popular that other San Diego restaurants put it on their menus. Calves’ liver with herbs, onions and mushrooms, a recipe that Strandberg said he learned while cooking at the noted Carl Butler restaurant in Stockholm, was a tender triumph that required only a slender slice of the restaurant’s creamy Oscar cake as a chaser.

The atmosphere was, in all honesty, quite like that at a wake. Longtime customers traveled from table to table mourning the passing of a place that stood, unwaveringly and above all, for quality.

“This is a sad night for San Diego,” commented one guest who said he had stopped in to “pay his last respects.”

Restaurateur Bertrand Hug, proprietor of the highly rated Mille Fleurs in Rancho Santa Fe, also came in for a last Gustaf Anders dinner. “This is a tremendous loss,” he said. “It’s bad news. I’m upset about what it implies for the restaurant business. Gustaf Anders kept me on my toes, and it’s a shock to see them close.”

Co-owner Magnuson said it was “sad and scary” to be closing. “When you have a restaurant that demands your time like ours has, you have no outside life. These customers have become our friends and family, and we’re losing them,” he said. “But they say, ‘Quit while you’re ahead,’ and, since we have no place to go but down, I guess it’s time to cut loose from San Diego.”

Given the circumstances, Magnuson and Strandberg do not seem to have quit while they were ahead. They will, however, open a new Gustaf Anders in Costa Mesa, in Orange County, in early 1989.

San Diego, meanwhile, will not cease to dine out, although the lights along its restaurant row may seem, at least for a while, to burn a little less brightly.